20 years old IBM Netfinity 7000 server (PWJ71)

[@Psychlist1972]

I love all the engineering that went into the cases for these servers.

[@mattjex]

Great video, it's such a shame that it had to be thrown out.. As a retro PC collector I'd have happily added this to my collection and kept it alive! I'm sure there are many collectors like me that would love to help you re-home things when they are for the trash.

[@PlaywithJunk]

Yes I know. But selling this stuff, finding a buyer who is willing to pay for transportation, is a time consuming task sometimes. And In fact, I'm surprised about the interest of many people for this old IBM machine. If I knew that before, I would have sold it not scrapped.

[@volkhen0]

I think it's because it's very similar to desktop PC, runs Windows etc.

[@evergriven7402]

it is such a shame and wrong somehow, something built to be so reliable and as expensive as it was to get scrapped ..

[@ericcindycrowder7482]

How much money would one make in recycling the raw materials in this machine, ie gold, aluminum, and copper?

[@AK-nb6hz]

Aw man I'd love to have this.. I was always fascinated by these machines when I was a kid. My school had a pretty low end hp netserver but the school was networked on 10b/t and 10b2 and I learned a lot via it!

[@Coolkeys2009]

I hope someone is collecting those for a museum, thanks for powering it up for one last time.

[@mitchlalovie2158]

"Do not take it apart, turn it on", that's gold.... :-) !EEVblog

[@VMFRD]

My first server was a Pentium Pro 200MHz, It had individual voltage regulators for the processors as well. I loved that machine!

[@RBSVader]

Case is excellent. Already want one for modding.

[@MsJinkerson]

I wish I could get something like that

[@GlobalOffense]

It would be great to convert this into a hidden fridge. Shave off all the front pieces of the computer and attach them to a fridge door. So it still looks like the computer with the hard drives but when you open it, it’s a fridge

[@huski2371]

I miss the old slotted Pentium CPUs.

[@szilardbartalos500]

As a retro PC collector sometimes I want to cry while watching your channel.

[@amirvelasquez7874]

Bro, I found a netfinity 5100 in my garage

[@DoRC]

You guys must have a lot of storage room to be able to hold onto a boat anchor for 12 years

[@Psychlist1972]

Maybe it was in-use until yesterday, like those schools with a Commodore 64 running the HVAC system. :)

[@Psychlist1972]

(Scratch that. I see it was last booted 12 years ago)

[@Coolkeys2009]

They seem to keep legacy systems around as back ups for customers that may still be using them.

[@douro20]

An Amiga 2000 system controlled the HVAC system of the Grand Rapids USD in Michigan up until recently. The system was programmed by a high school student.

[@PlaywithJunk]

We have many customers with very old machines and as long as the maintenance contracts run, we have to keep the spares. The problem is that I usually get no notice when contracts run out. So from time to time I check the stock and compare contracts. This machine was needed until 2013 and we only had 2 customers. That means if the machine never fails, there is no need to touch the spare.

[@aarongreenfield9038]

Starving kids could have taken bytes out of that computer!

[@aarongreenfield9038]

@PeePee2000. No, they would prefer microchips and dip switches.

[@H3adcrash]

Interesting to see how similar servers were at the time. The Compaq ProLiant 5500 I have here as retro lab server has basically the same construction with basically a backplane, the legacy I/O and that on a board. I guess it was the trend at the time, hehe

[@Tangobaldy]

I would love to have a server like this. Where can I buy stuff like this in UK apart from epray

[@PlaywithJunk]

Check for computer hardware brokers. There are many of them. These guys are professional sellers of used hardware and sometimes stuff is very cheap.

[@SimbaSeven.]

Nice little system. You could swap out the bottom array for a pair of SAS arrays along with a PCI (or PCI-X) SAS controller and turn it into a giant file server running FreeBSD (yes, ZFS actually runs reasonably well on x86 if you have plenty of memory and not taxing it too hard). Might want to max out the memory as well. EDIT: I had FreeBSD running on an old Compaq Proliant 6500 with 4GB of RAM and 4x PPro 200MHz processors. Ran great until recently when it started having PSU issues. Not bad for a 20 year old server.

[@PlaywithJunk]

Well... I could do that. But I have much more modern hardware here in case I would need a fileserver or so. The newer servers also need less power. (I just got a pile of HP DL360 Gen8)

[@Psychlist1972]

Did you clean this out before the video? Surprising lack of dust bunnies in there. Those servers move so much air, they're usually full of crap.

[@GaryKildall]

Towelie from South park cartoon series might have been there before the bunnies, Towelie does computer duster to get relaxed with as side effect a dust free area.

[@stephanbrenner3317]

not really. I have a Sun X4440 with over 50khours on it. It look like new, no dust at all. It all depends on the server room where it was operated. Ours had an air filter system, hence there was no dust comparable to a clean room.

[@PlaywithJunk]

I have cleaned it a bit in fact but it was not very dirty. Most of our machines come from air conditioned server rooms. There is never dust in it.

[@madbstard1]

Play with Junk - you said at 4:11 that "you" set up that machine in 2005 but the log files are showing 12/05/2005 as the last usage before you powered up for this video. Was it switched off and in a junk room since then?

[@PlaywithJunk]

More or less...yes. We bought that machine as a spare and I set it up with Win2000 to see if everything is working. Then it went to storage and was never used since.

[@RonLaws]

i am sad to see such a beast torn apart. a really unique form factor that just isn't common these days. Pedestal servers are still sold of course, but most people go for rack servers these days since they are a better use of vertical space.

[@abes.4040]

20 years old ? it looks like something you see on PC Magazine this month. I love IBM machines. They are the Mercedes Benz of computers. Put a Linux or Debian on it, it can still be a server for a small business or school.

[@PlaywithJunk]

But the IBM Benz has stopped making servers. This is now all Lenovo... IBM only does mainframes and software. Don't know if that was an intelligent move.

[@thetekcampreview7578]

10:30 This got a PowerPC RISC chip, not just a Apple and Motorola thing

[@johnhunt1725]

Hard to believe someone decommissioned this thing in 2005 and then just sat on it for 12 years.

[@PlaywithJunk]

Our storage room is pretty big and sometimes stuff gets simply forgotten. And some devices were kept because there is a chance that we will need it. Sometimes it's hard to say if we need it or not... so better keep it :-)

[@johnhunt1725]

@@PlaywithJunk The last time I was involved with decommissioning a server, it went home with me :)

[@ecorp2767]

Do you remember how fast the drives spins ? Is 10k and + drives was around back in the days ?

[@PlaywithJunk]

Seagate ST39102LC "Cheetah"... yes indeed 10'000RPM

[@ThisOLmaan]

what does this server do??? there purpose? never did know what severs are good for home use?

[@ThinkingBetter]

3 processors running 500MHz. Nowadays your smart phone might have 8 cores and run at >2GHz.

[@ThinkingBetter]

depunkt Yes, just look at the graphical resolution on your smart phone. Try play a 4K video, a high resolution game and so on. Graphics and CPU performance definitely are superior. One obvious reason is that your modern phone is using solid state memory rather than old rotating hard drives. And the SOC itself is likely 64 bits and with a highly integrated on the die bus architecture minimizing any transport data latency. How many times is your smart phone faster than the Apollo computer that landed us on the moon 50 years ago? Probably you got in your hand around 150,000,000 times more instructions per second 🤔 But agree, not all instructions are equal but modern SOCs are much more than old age RISC processors. Besides the obvious ARM cores, they also include GPU cores, DSP cores, Neural processing cores, hardware video/audio decoders/encoders and of course a lot of local cache memory that is highly performance optimized on the die itself.

[@Trev0r98]

@depunkt I guarantee you that today's 2GHz+ 8-core smartphones have at least 2 orders of magnitude greater integer and floating point performance than this 1998-vintage 3-way Pentium III Xeon beast has.

[@dazaspc]

Got to love the redundancy of replaceable VRM's, also a little surprised at the CPU cache packaging. It would have been worth the price of a decent new car in it's day. Also in its day it would have been made redundant pretty quickly as things were moving forward pretty fast. He also never mentioned the chip set it couldn't have been a BX as they were only good for 2 cpu's.

[@bitrage.]

That is sooo freakin cool! id LOVE to have that "junk"

[@amirvelasquez7874]

Hi bro, I just found an ibm netfinity 5100 server in my garage, it's from my dads nerd gold age, I'm from bolivia, do you know if I can sell it and for how much?

[@PlaywithJunk]

I don't know.... it seems there are some people who want that kind of server. Do you have an online marketplace in Bolivia? Something like Ebay? Put it there and see what happens :-)

[@ericcindycrowder7482]

Nice, IBM PowerPC CPU on the RAID controller card.

[@intel386DX]

this machine costs mach more for collectors then for the scrap! why you scraped it ? ;( :(

[@PlaywithJunk]

Because sometimes time is more valuable than money. I know that there is a person for every thing to give away. But to find that person needs a lot of patience. So if you need free space NOW(!), you have to scrap stuff. At least I keep it in a digital version and you can see it too :-)

[@intel386DX]

@@PlaywithJunk yes, but I am sure that this cold went in someones basement and wait better days , and this is not too huge like a mainframe, and even mainframe can be played some-ware, but not for scrap :( BTW We all know what scrap is : all our junk goes to the third world in Asia and Africa ...

[@HamburgerExplosion]

@@PlaywithJunk idk, i know it's two years ago almost, but i do think it's sad, you had it for all those years and didn't really care about it. there was lots of time to realize you didn't care about it and to give it away, and the room shown at the beginning has lots of room in it to be stored temporarily, i would think long enough for someone to pick it up for free. Maybe you were moving out of the space?

[@stevenleisinger6891]

i saw in the background some HP Interconnects - do you have some bazle's for the interconnects from the c7000 left? like to buy 4 :)

[@PlaywithJunk]

do you mean the covers for empty slots? Yes I have some... send me a message to [e-mail]

[@foca2002]

I worked with one of these running Unixware and another running Openserver. Still have nightmares of changing Dat tapes.

[@PlaywithJunk]

DAT... brrrr! 🙂 We repaired those drives. Will say, we tried it...

[@foca2002]

@@PlaywithJunk at that time LTO 4 was the state of art in tape backup, we had a huge Dell Tape Library, a smaller one for restores and these old servers had Dat tapes because no one knew how to set Arcserve on them. It was DDS-4, 20GB, at that time LTO who was old tech had 400GB. The server had 72GB so 3 tapes every day.

[@markarca6360]

Windows 2000 Server is the successor to Windows NT Server (The startup screen says it was built on [Windows] NT Technology.). Succeeding Windows server OSes (Server 2003-Server 2016) are using the Windows NT kernel.

[@PlaywithJunk]

Yes... and NT stands for "New Technology" as a change from the older DOS based Windows versions.

[@LellePrinter82]

That's a cool big old server, I think it would've been fun to rebuild for more modern hardware. I liked the black old IBM cases.

[@PlaywithJunk]

You certainly have enough space for a huge water cooling system :-)

[@LellePrinter82]

Yes indeed, megaspace for watercooling. I wonder if I ever get one here in sweden. Its little brother 5500 isn't that small either.@@PlaywithJunk

[@NinoJoel]

Maybe its old, but it has a really nice case to rebuild it with new hardware..... Pretty sad that I live too far away.

[@PlaywithJunk]

Yeah... much room for a water cooling system :-)

[@holgerw8434]

are there another two smaler powersupplies under the 3 big ones?

[@PlaywithJunk]

Not for the server. The other 2 power supplies are for the disk enclosure. This is installed under the server.

[@Koschuh8401]

thanks for clarification

[@Sine1040]

IS that a HP Visualize machine in the background? Looks a lot like the big brother of a B2000 I used to work on, also ancient tech by now ;)

[@PlaywithJunk]

Yes. It's a Visualize J5600. I'm always amazed what people discover in my videos :-)

[@jj74qformerlyjailbreak3]

I Just ❤️ The Name Of This Channel. Every Time He Says “DONT Take It Apart First, Turn It On” It’s Kinda Like Giving My Son A Rattle And Asking Him Not To Shake It Till After He Eats His Peas.

[@RiccardoRivi]

27:19 i've never seen any psu made in italy exept for this and my old psu, it was a 500w psu, it weighs nothing, it was a oven, it had a molex connector, 2 sata connectors, 2 4 pin cpu connector, a 20 + 4 pin connector and nothing else, well.. it sucks but i think that psu is good

[@andrer2274]

is this a normal desktop server or, a mini computer or, a super computer?

[@PlaywithJunk]

How about watching the entire video and using Google? A stupid question is one that can be answered by yourself.

[@brainsmine8551]

But what does it score on cinebench :D

[@PlaywithJunk]

Cinebench score is not available but it will run Crysis. Cry sis is what happened when older brother angers younger sister :-)

[@theeternalklansmanmaestro5039]

I like the ästhetic design :)

[@jj74qformerlyjailbreak3]

I Had A Couple Of Those Zeon’s 933mhz I Think I Saved One For My Collection. Will Have To Dig Around In The Barn. I Have A Nice Glass Case It Needs Housed In One Day The Whole Family Will Be ReUnited.

[@jeffm2787]

Brings back memories. 👍

[@tomtalk24]

Anyone know if IBM owns that colour? Aesthetics like logos and thumb screws i get, but even some of those resistors are purple. Must cost a mint to get the odd electrical component done in purple, looks great.

[@PlaywithJunk]

I think thosa are capacitors and that purple color is not unusual. You find them in many high end equipment, not only IBM

[@tomtalk24]

I should have timestamped... 27:45 ...resistors. I thought it may have been exclusive, thanks for the clarification though :)

[@PlaywithJunk]

Yeah those are resistors. But also not so unusual in purple...

[@PlaywithJunk]

BTW the power supply was not made by IBM. Made in Italy by Magnetec for IBM.

[@jolesco]

Maybe the PSU had AC power connected even if decomissioned, and the CMOS battery didn't discharge due to standby power being present

[@PlaywithJunk]

The system was disconnected in our basement. And having it on standby all those years would most likely destroy the power supplies. The create heat but no fan is working... very bad.

[@jolesco]

I see, I was thinking in "PC" terms (+5VSB signal) It's fascinating that the battery is still charged after all these years

[@marcograziano6397]

I'm a Retro PC collector, especially ibm stuffs. I already have 3 Netfinity Servers: 3000, 5100 and 5500. The 7000 is my dream netfinity server, can't find this machine anywhere in the world.

[@simontay4851]

Do you keep the HDDs? You should sell the P3 Xeon CPUs on eBay. They'd sell for at least €25 each I think. Pair one with a slot 1 Intel 440BX ATX motherboard and you could build a very good DIY NAS file server running FreeNAS or OpenMediaVault or a retro gaming computer. If this uses four intel 440BX northbridge chips (1 per CPU) then I think the max RAM this can support is 1GB (256x4) per CPU.

[@daimyo2]

awesome modular architecture

[@VicGreenBitcoin]

I suggest donate some stuff to victor bart retro machines

[@PlaywithJunk]

The question is, where does "Victor Bart" live? Is he willing to pay $500 for the shipment? I would love to give my stuff to someone but that's too complicated if that someone can't come over to grab the stuff personally. I mean, how do I ship such a machine? Building a wooden box? I'm not a carpenter....

[@VicGreenBitcoin]

@@PlaywithJunk Probably yes, this is his channel, he loves this retro stuff: kzbin.infovideos

[@andrewcassidy1790]

is that a powerPC processor I spy in the RAID controller?

[@PlaywithJunk]

PowerPC-403GCX... yes you saw that right. IBM made that chip together with Apple and Motorola. It makes sense to use it for their own products. And it's a good RISC processor, many RAID controllers of this time have one.

[@Koschuh8401]

28:50 thank you for opening up the PSU.

[@Windows-zb9il]

This Machine last powered around 9 Days before my Birthday lol

[@PicaDelphon]

AND P.S. the other CPU card on the I/O plane is the (Light's Out) Board so you can boot it from a different Location.. I'll give you a $1000 for it..

[@MrKillswitch88]

This one should have been saved, slot 2 Pentium 2 and 3 Xeon systems are getting pretty rare so they have collectors value but also are ok for dual use as a retro gaming system with the right upgrades.

[@DangerousPictures]

I know you probably get asked this a lot, but where do you work that you have all this stuff laying around?

[@RetroMarkyRM]

Great channel. Fascinating videos and content :)

[@JuanSanchez-rb4qu]

Wait, P3 xeon? in 1997?

[@PlaywithJunk]

Well, why not ?

[@78bakelit]

Ein Wunder dass die Schrottschüssel noch funzt, mein neuer Computer mit einem i9 Prozessor ist in einem halben Jahr schon abgelegen.

[@jj74qformerlyjailbreak3]

🇮🇹 Makes Solid Power Supplies. Those Things Are Reliable Even For Converting Them To Desktop PSU

[@vicostea]

Why don't you donate them to a museum? I'm sure that there are some museums who will gladly accept such donations.

[@douro20]

It's a shame no one builds servers like this anymore.

[@PlaywithJunk]

Well, that IBM Netfinity machine was not the best example of good manufacturing. It is already on the cheap side compared with othe brands.

[@theeternalklansmanmaestro5039]

The other ozillators are for improved overclocking ^^

[@autonomousglisteningwater2286]

Funny how current servers don’t boot any faster. In fact that server seemed to boot faster. But then again it might not be running very many services.

[@PlaywithJunk]

Computers get faster for applications. But booting, maintenance and updates take a lot longer.

[@deeppurplefan]

Half Terabyte. Damn.

[@derkeksinator17]

Also with all the servers getting scrapped I see all these voltage regulators going to the scrapyard, which makes me a little sad :´(

[@simontay4851]

Yes, I would salvage them. They are useful DC DC converters.

[@PlaywithJunk]

They are useful if you have a 12VDC input and you need an output voltage of 1V...3V

[@balthromaw6305]

would have loved to have that machine even today... cause ram and CPU's are up-gradable

[@Trev0r98]

Not even worth 1/10th the shipping costs (to most normal, practical people, that is).

[@balthromaw6305]

@@Trev0r98 well considering I have several ECC 512MB and 1GB SDR ram modules... it would make for a dang good data server for local storage

[@Nerven86]

Can it run Crysis?

[@PlaywithJunk]

I waited for that :-)

[@theeternalklansmanmaestro5039]

It should :D

[@17plus9]

Yes!

[@colinjohnston8519]

Stfu

[@SakiSkai]

This is like ASMR

[@PlaywithJunk]

Thank you. I didn't know that my vids have such an effect :-)

[@УльзанСеверов]

how much Mh/s on Ethereum?

[@Goran_Varbanov]

This monster server has never been a junk, and never will be! It's pure gold! Classic from IBM! It's a shame that it will go to srap! Can't you just leave it alone?

[@PlaywithJunk]

There are so many machines all over the world going to scrap silently. I'm giving it a chance to live forever on KZbin... think about it that way :-)

[@fobef]

Pentium III didn't come out until 1999

[@PicaDelphon]

You Make my cry every time I see your Videos' "Don't Scrape it, Re BUILD IT BETTER..!" I still use my Servers Proliant 7000 (4) Xeon III 550 (2M Cache), 4GB RAM and (18) SCSI HD +(48) extra SCSI Drives (Fiber Array) .. Don't Scrap Sell them WHOLE.. Don't be Stupid you'll make more Money..RE-SELL WORKS..

[@PlaywithJunk]

Yes I know. But sometimes selling these things is a lot of work and at the end you get a few $$. And sometimes people would pay more than you think... It's like Roulette, you never know what comes :-)

[@warp9988]

Yep. Put it on ebay as "for parts. not guaranteed.".

[@evergriven7402]

it is such a shame and wrong somehow, something built to be so reliable and as expensive as it was to get scrapped ..

[@17plus9]

2005 was awesome!

[@TECK2024]

Tenho 25 desse na minha empresa

[@dgjm7129]

This server sounds quieter than my laptop when in idle

[@Sir_Corgerus]

my laptop transforms into an F16 when i launch Warframe

[@bradleyzorg]

hp g5678 server. no such server exists. but I am familiar with dell drac and lights out. Please confirm your HP model

[@PlaywithJunk]

I meant HP G5 G6 G7 etc. the generations of servers...

[@JeroenvandenBerg82]

Yes but not G8, someone at HP though about it long and hard and "revolutionized" it to "Gen8".... (just WHY?!) Great video, what a monster to power up, Windows 2000 even, have not seen that in a while, keep it up! Awesome to see these creatures of forgotten days.

[@PlaywithJunk]

Yeah... G8 or Gen8...what a difference! Maybe that guy is paid by the number of letters on the front panel :-)

[@bradleyzorg]

I enjoy these vids too. Brings me back to the "old" days.

[@someguy4915]

@@JeroenvandenBerg82 'G8' is apparently a swear in Chinese I believe the story was...

[@evergriven7402]

can it mine bitcoin what is the GH/w ratio

[@AlptekinCK]

Harika video olmuş

[@MsJinkerson]

those CPUs must be the drakes

[@magnatron1086]

I had a couple of these on eval from IBM back in the 90s. Absolutely loved the build quality, so easy to work with too. Sadly the "IBM tax" was so high I couldn't justify buying them and we went with Intel OEM servers instead (back when Intel were into that kind of stuff). To be fair they worked non-stop for several years, and were about half the price of the Netfinity. But they didn't have the cool stuff like the front display. They did have hot-swap PCI though, but I never used it. Even if I had needed to swap a PCI card, I never would have dared doing it while a server was up! One wrong move and you kill the server and maybe yourself! ;-)

[@PlaywithJunk]

That's the reason why all manufacturers gave up making hot swap PCI ;-)

[@gpowerdragon9852]

I'm guessing Still used in Afrika Still Works Still if it still works don't replace it

[@markarca6360]

High-end servers at that time (late 90s-early 2000) have probably these specs: one or more (maximum of 4) Slot 2 CPUs, RIMM/RDRAM memory modules, and Ultra SCSI HDDs (this system featured have 3 different capacities: 36 GB, 72 GB, and 146 GB (3.5"/10K rpm).

[@yoppindia]

You can extract few grams of gold.

[@erixmix]

I had one of these things. They weigh a tonnnnnnnn.

[@Koschuh8401]

Tantalum

[@likfrikbik]

My smartphone is 5 times stronger than this server..lol I love your videos,keep them up! :)

[@americancitizen748]

I am surprised it did not start singing "Daisy" as you pulled out the cards...

[@tugaminhoto4969]

why you destroyed this beautiful machine like this?!?! :S

[@MsJinkerson]

I have a Dell power edge 6300 with 4 Xeon Drakes

[@HuntersMoon78]

512MB of onboard storage (Johnny Five)

[@fuifdruohv345]

80Gb (160 with doubler) - Johnny Mnemonic :-)

[@HuntersMoon78]

@@fuifdruohv345 Nice

[@bongfartz1036]

Why. Such a waste

[@tfilefan]

1:27 "EEVBlog fanboys get wild"

[@PlaywithJunk]

😃

[@ray_sattler]

Why do you scrap such things and dont give it to collectors? I dont understand that... This stuff is getting rarer and rare and all the companies just throw it away. I mean you know, that people are interested in this stuff, that is why you are making this videos...

[@PlaywithJunk]

Giving such stuff away is harder than you think. I gave many old computers to collectors and fans but they had to get them personally. Shipping stuff is expensive and most people don't want to pay for that. And there is always the danger of damage. Would you pay $500 just for the shipping of that IBM? You have no idea how much stuff goes to the junk bin every month. So the least I can do is to preserve the more interesing items on video. Most devices vanish without a trace.... Sad but true.

[@ray_sattler]

@@PlaywithJunk Then i would try to give it away locally for free. There are many people who collect stuff like that out there. And even if you need to send it, its not 500$ if you don't send across borders. Where are you from? I bet not from Germany :(

[@thomasmica2856]

Круто ! было интересно

[@PlaywithJunk]

Большое спасибо (Google translate:-)

[@olpqay]

OS installed on RAID5 seems not like a good idea, if your aim is maximum uptime...

[@PlaywithJunk]

I see no downside on RAID 5. If a drive fails you replace it and there is a spare drive too. It can rebuild in the background while the OS keeps working.

[@derkeksinator17]

Why not? You have at least one backup and improved reading and writing capabilities. It won't be the fastest writing lot's of files, but it doesn't have to. You install the OS once and every task that follows doesn't really use these drives when it comes to in and output of the server

[@olpqay]

I thougt, the OS is not responding while the RAID-Controller is rebuilding a RAID5, because it can not run on only two drives (and using the parity-information on these two on the fly as the third drive). In my idea the older controllers can only use the parity information for rebuild. Hot Spare is always a good idea, no question.

[@PlaywithJunk]

No no... those server RAID controllers have always been able to continue working in degraded state. It would not make much sense if you had to wait until the RAID is restored/rebuilt.

[@olpqay]

Play with Junk Oh, okay - I didn't know that :-)